Hearing voices in the absence of another speaker – what psychiatry terms an auditory verbal hallucination – is often associated with a wide range of negative emotions. Mainstream clinical research addressing the emotional dimensions of voice-hearing has tended to treat these as self-evident, undifferentiated, and so effectively interchangeable. But what happens when a richer, more nuanced understanding of specific emotions is brought to bear upon the analysis of distressing voices? Probing the status of ‘voice’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, this paper presents work in progress from a critical medical humanities study of shame and voice-hearing being conducted as part of Hearing the Voice.